The Sudden Surges That Forge Evolutionary Trees
31st May 2026
Over the last half-billion years, squid, octopuses and their kin have evolved much like a fireworks display, with long, anticipatory pauses interspersed with intense, explosive changes. The many-armed diversity of cephalopods is the result of the evolutionary rubber hitting the road right after lineages split into new species, and precious little of their evolution has been the slow accumulation of gradual change.
They aren’t alone. Sudden accelerations spring from the crooks of branches in evolutionary trees, across many scales of life — seemingly wherever there’s a branching system of inherited modifications — in a dynamic not examined in traditional evolutionary models.
That’s the perspective emerging from a new mathematical framework published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B that describes the pace of evolutionary change. The new model, part of a roughly 50-year-long reimagining of evolution’s tempo, is rooted in the concept of punctuated equilibrium, which was introduced by the paleontologists Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould in 1972.
Never trust a ‘scientific truth’ that is less than a hundred years old. And never trust anything said by Dr Fauci at all.